Fourteen years ago this week, Cardinal News country was dealing with a lot of misery and destruction following a deadly outbreak of tornadoes.
Three deaths occurred in Washington County and one in Halifax County as 19 tornadoes swarmed Virginia on April 27-28, 2011. Baseball-sized hail pummeled areas near Saltville and Pearisburg, among others. It was a rare scary spring night in our Southwest and Southside Virginia backyard akin to something Tornado Alley would experience.
Yet few in the nation knew about our regional suffering, as it was but a tiny sliver of the 2011 Super Outbreak, which spawned 368 tornadoes in 21 states over four days (April 25-28), killing 348 people, injuring over 3,000 and totaling over $10 billion in damage.
Our evening of tornadoes was the overflow from an extraordinary outbreak focused to our southwest, as monstrous wedge tornadoes shredded Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. It was also the third significant occurrence of tornadoes for our region in that month of April back in 2011, as repeated atmospheric setups with strong shear and instability and moisture developed.
We are in a much different weather pattern as April turns to May in 2025, one that has not been able to bring much in the way of widespread rain, let alone serious widespread severe storm risks.
Some showers and thunderstorms are expected into the weekend, and it is not out of the question that a few could be strong to severe or produce locally heavy rain. But while the central U.S. is continuing to get raked by rounds of severe thunderstorms, tornadoes and flooding rain, that has not been translating eastward across the Appalachians toward our region.
Two weeks in a row, the 7-day rainfall forecast map posted on Monday night by NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center has looked very similar.
The maps on April 21 and April 28 have shown heavy rain in the central U.S. with widespread significant rainfall stretching northeast into the Ohio Valley, but seemingly drying out to just a trickle east of the Appalachians in Virginia.
Little wonder that going into the last day of the month, it is the second driest March-April period in 114 years of weather records at Blacksburg with 3.16 inches, the fifth driest in 133 years at Lynchburg with 2.56 inches of rain, the ninth driest in 114 years at Roanoke with 3.48 inches, and the 15th driest at Danville in 107 years with 4.53 inches.
Some showers and maybe a few storms might be enough to bump these rankings down one or two spots before April ends at midnight on this Wednesday, maybe, but heavy downpours or long soaking rainfall that would make up more ground against history aren’t expected on this Wednesday evening before May begins.
Ever since our active winter and its Arctic air intrusions let go, and that soggy and icy February gave way to a dry March, the strongest jet stream flow has set up to our west and northwest. As a result, even when we’ve had a cold front press through or some moisture gets pulled northward, we haven’t had the atmospheric dynamics that would power much in the way of severe thunderstorms.
It would seem that “classic severe season,” one of five overlapping severe weather seasons Virginia might experience that we discussed in this space last spring, has already shifted well to our west and northwest.
Classic severe weather season here refers to the annual development of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes in the central and eastern U.S. as winter shifts to spring. Warmth and moisture begin returning northward but the strong winds aloft that have steered winter storm systems haven’t quite yet retreated into Canada or weakened with the warming season.
How these factors interact varies year to year, and at different periods within a single season, as variable atmospheric patterns shift, but in general, outbreaks of severe storms and tornadoes affect the states near the Gulf Coast first in late winter and early spring and then move northward and northwestward through the spring. By summer, it is typically the Dakotas and central Canada that are experiencing the bulk of supercells and tornadoes from these big-ticket atmospheric setups.
One never wants to be too quick in declaring that this severe weather season has passed, as there can be dips in the jet stream at later times that brings it back closer to the region. But it is so often the case that when we start seeing major tornadic supercells in the High Plains as far north as western Nebraska, it’s hard to get the jet stream to dig back to the south for more than a brief spell again in the season.
In weeks ahead we’ll try to get a handle on where our summer weather might go. An early guess would be that persistence of high pressure over the East and Southeast might lead to a hot, sticky summer with scattered storminess but infrequent organized rain or widespread storms.
While it appears the high-end supercells and tornadoes are happening mostly far away from our commonwealth this particular spring, our “squall line season” and “sporadic summer severe season” are yet to take hold. It could yet rumble and gust memorably in our region — and quite a few folks won’t mind some pouring as dry as it’s been, just so it doesn’t get carried away like it did in February and September.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:
